Cloud Native + Kubernetes Manchester

Cloud Native April

Wed, Apr 15 · 6:00 PM BST

Bonded Warehouse, 18 Lower Byrom Street, M3 4AP, Manchester, GB

Please RSVP via https://community.cncf.io/events/details/cncf-cloud-native-manchester-presents-cloud-native-april/.

We have to ensure we meet a minimum number of events and people at each one to keep being an "official" CNCF group.

We are back at Bonded Warehouse, thanks to Morson-Edge for hosting again and NScale for feeding us!

To help you find the venue, the what3words location is hooks.decreased.universally. Make sure to come past the Crystal Maze side and ring the bell for reception.

Whether you are a seasoned developer, a cloud computing enthusiast, or simply curious about the scene, this event is the perfect opportunity to connect with like-minded individuals in Manchester.

# Agenda

6:00 pm - Networking with food and drinks
7:00 pm - DBOS: making reliable cloud workflows - Afzal Muhammad
7:30 pm - Break
8:00 pm - From Bare Metal to Private Mesh: Building and Accessing a Kubernetes Cluster Anywhere - Thomas Riley

## DBOS: making reliable cloud workflows

DBOS (https://www.dbos.dev/) is a new framework to develop reliable workflows (or durable executions) on the cloud in a very easy way.
To build a reliable workflow we usually need a mixture of idempotency, restart exactly from failure point, exactly-once processing, observable queues, and other features. Using traditional methods like AWS Lambda or Step Functions can get you only so far, before your system starts to become very complex and costly!
DBOS provides all these features through a system design innovation done at MIT which keep complexity at bay and cost to only what you use. I am a software engineer with over 7 years of experience in the industry.
I've mostly worked in the serverless world and I have kept thinking ever since that building serverless workflows should be easier compared to what the cloud providers are offering to us. I started following the DBOS project and I've been building side projects with it ever since. I also actively contribute to their open source SDK ( https://github.com/dbos-inc/dbos-transact-golang ).
Now, I want to share my learning with the community :)

## From Bare Metal to Private Mesh: Building and Accessing a Kubernetes Cluster Anywhere

What does “cloud native” look like when the cloud is your kitchen table?
In this talk, I’ll walk through building a real Kubernetes cluster from scratch on physical hardware using Raspberry Pis, starting from bare metal and ending with a securely accessible, production-style workload. We’ll bootstrap a cluster using K3s and install a set of baseline components you’d expect in any serious Kubernetes environment.
From there, the focus shifts to the part that is usually glossed over: networking and access. Rather than exposing services via public ingress or relying on port-forwarding, I’ll demonstrate how a Kubernetes cluster can be integrated into a private mesh network using the Tailscale Kubernetes operator. We’ll look at how this changes the operational model for access, security, and developer experience—particularly for home labs, edge deployments, and clusters that live outside a traditional cloud environment.
To make it concrete, I’ll deploy a simple chat server workload into the cluster and then connect to it from a mobile client on an iPhone that is not on the same local network. The traffic originates from a mobile carrier network behind carrier-grade NAT, enters the private Tailscale mesh, and reaches the Kubernetes service directly — no ingress controller, no public IPs, no port-forwarding, and no traditional VPN tunnels.
This talk is aimed at anyone curious about:

• Running Kubernetes outside the cloud
• Secure, practical access to private clusters
• Using mesh networking to simplify service exposure
• Home lab, edge, and “real-world” Kubernetes use cases

Expect live demos, real hardware, and an honest look at what works, what doesn’t, and where this approach makes sense.